(First Edition, Signed Bookplate) (Winner of the British Book Award for Literary Fiction; shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize) The inspiration for the motion picture starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, David Mitchell's British Book Award–winning 2004 novel combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation. Also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, as was his previous novel number9dream, Cloud Atlas brilliantly explores how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. This handsome Modern Library edition—the book's first hardcover printing—is a first edition with a bookplate signed by Mitchell.

"Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across this novel's every page."—NYTBR

"One of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? modern classics that no doubt is—and should be—read by any student of contemporary literature."—Dave Eggers

"The novel as series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book, and yet—not just dazzling, amusing, or clever but heartbreaking and passionate, too. I've never read anything quite like it, and I'm grateful to have lived, for a while, in all its many worlds."—Michael Chabon